Category: Underfoot Poets

A series of 10 sonnets by Adam Penna up at Underfoot today.
Poems full of the sound of wind, natural & fresh, full of hope & exhilaration at the small mercies that come from pure observance of the minor joys in life.
You know what to do dear reader.

& an update. Go & read our Chapbook Confessions guidelines in the menu bar if you’re interested in offering your sagely advice & experience from publishing a chapbook or collection, along with poems from that chapbook. All the details are there, but if you have any questions you can email us, which is provide there.
I hope to hear from you soon.

How to Worship

Today, a thousand fallen leaves: some yellow,some red, some green, some circling the trees.They teach us how to worship, and the wind—it lifts the worshippers. It whips them up.They seem hysterical with happiness.I am hysterical with happiness. The sun shines on my head and on my hands. It touches the whiteness of the page. Meanwhile, inside, outside and everywhere, my friendsand people I have never met or known,contribute to the tumult. Let’s make an aisle,and, stepping through the happy congregation,cradle the grocerybags, search for the keys,and wipe our feet before we enter the house.

The Happiness of Trees

I don’t want to instruct. I want to beinstructed by trees, loosed of leaves and leavings.I go, step over the threshold and out into the yard. Already my arms swing overhead. And you, watching from the stoop…

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Thanks to Krishna Prasad for taking these 5, which, I don't think are very easy poems & particularly the last poem, which is about the Seorak War Memorial in which the poet imagines histories superimposed in real time. I went through a stage of submitting poems without titles, simply using the lemniscate & this has [...]

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Thrilled that I was able to encourage Irena to submit to us, she is a poet with a rare insight on her lived perspective as a woman, wife, mother, migrant & humanitarian.
Please, please, please encourage Irena to write more, she’s really very good at it & needs people to tell her, to give her the confidence to do it as much as possible, for my sake, think about me dear readers, I want more to read from Irena.

Thanks for reading & see our submissions page if you are interested in submitting, we are always open to submissions from emerging writers, hidden, shy writers & the cream of the crop. We don’t care where you are in your career, we want the best, we want poems that reveal, expand, incise with insight, boldly baffle, poems impossible to predict but speak to our deeper senses of understanding, the poems from everyone to everything, the poems of our climate, clippered with lillies & speak out the kindling as they rage on the pyre.

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I am a huge fan of Barton, which is odd for me as I don’t usually like skinny poems or prose poems, which are Barton’s usual go-to form.
However, Barton is just so damn inventive & consistently surprises me, he is impossible to anticipate. He’s insightful, mysterious, full of humour & humanity.
As he he says above “I keep detailed notes on avoidance” & I believe he does.
He sent me a couple of his books instead of payment for my Isacoustic publication & I read them often & I find myself laughing joyously & his inventiveness & cannot put the book down.
Find him, learn him & become addicted to him.

funereal

as some things incorrectly have wings, we stamp a chicken into the hood of a cop car. the groundskeeper on break inside the church wonders aloud how much is left of the lord. a boy not part of our boyhood bikes over to us with his feet he’s named individually show and tell. the cop chuckles but straightens out when he sees what I’ve made of my hand. the boy says careful it might stay that way for good.

the stripper

beauty is the beginning of beauty. a man and a woman wait together for a stripper. you know the man like an intimate thought. like a toddler covered head-to-toe in blue body paint stepping in front of a blue door. the woman is an unfinished stranger whose son comes home to be with war and whose husband rests until laziness subsides. the man is aware he’s the…

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Pleased to have Pablo Cuzco’s prose poems featured at Underfoot this week. Please show your support for Pablo as this is his first (& deserved) publication.
We are always looking for talented, unpublished writers to feature on Underfoot. Sometimes it takes a little push of encouragement to help a poet emerge & I hope Underfoot can toggle between the emerging & emerged.

Flowers of Dawn

A yellow moon over the rooftops—striking in silence—blue sky, dark and twinkling—stars meld into street light—alleyways cluttered with bottles clink | a cat howls in summer heat— water washes away the smear | bleary-eyed and broken, I stumble among dust bins and sediment of the living—crowned with a halo—spirits | God and Whisky—the One and the Same. Showers of dusty moonbeam create a fedora of night—a cap of dawn—a screw.

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The Royal Wedding In another dimension where fairness & justice is 5% above our own dimension’s… Harry complains he doesn’t look good in red, it’s his hair. Moreover, why does he have to wear William’s same Irish Guard’s Mounted Officer’s uniform, he looks like a proper twat, why couldn’t he just go to Saville Row, [...]

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While i am here & before i exhaust you with today's Charlie poem, i want to say that Tim Miller at Underfoot poetry has asked me to be a guest editor, so i am scouting poets. If you'd like 6 poems published, send me 8 to danielpaulmarshall85@gmail.com along with a bio, & a paragraph explaining [...]

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A grim poem from the Charlie Malurkey cohort of capers & general peculiarities. In short, Charlie reads prophecies in the pubic hair that arranges on his bathroom floor, taking it to be a message from Godly God. Sorry, so sorry. Body-Hairomancy Last night he bothering the audience with messages him got from Godly God, It [...]

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From the Wallace Variations. A couple of years old now. Actually, i seldom, if ever get insomnia, but when i do it is all the more frustrating for it isn't clear why i have it, i just have it. i can do nothing different & it just happens upon me. Thankfully it is rare. Insomnia [...]

“ There, I am desperately free and naive; but knowing this oh dear happiness, dear misery; there is no distinctive sign except that one tearing one’s heart, and a smile destined to nobody(...)" E.Stachura